I am interested in purchasing your books but with EF 5.0 am curious how relevant the books will be. Are there major differences between the book’s version and EF5 that could prove confusing? or are they similar enough that I won’t have any problems with using 5 in conjunction with the books.

Hi Marshall,
There are 3 books. The oldest, 2nd edition 900 pages was written using VS2010 which is quite different if you are using EDMX with VS2012 or 2013. I wrote a few blog posts about this. Start here: http://thedatafarm.com/book/after-3-years-devs-are-still-finding-programming-entity-framework-2ed-useful/ The biggest issue is that the 900 page 2nd edition book uses VS2010. Back then the T4 template generated EntityObjects & ObjectCOntext API. Now by default you get POCO objects and DbContext API. So some of the walkthroughs are confusing (and please use DbContext API). Many chapters are still very relevant and important, digging deeply into things like LINQ queries, performance and security. In the blog posts, I’ve made some recommendations about order of reading, what to skip or what pluralsight courses to fill in with.

The other two books are EXTREMELY relevant. The Code First book is missing Code First Migrations (added in EF4.3) enum support (added in .NET 4.5/EF5) and stored proc mapping (added to Code First in EF6). It is also missing some of the new features in EF6. Look here for those: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dn519921.aspx.

The DbContext book is absolutely relevant still. Not much has changed alog those lines even as we are now at EF6.